By Richard Leiby
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — The headquarters of Oakley, a maker of recreational and military gear, looks as if it belongs in a war zone. It’s a massive bunker with exposed steel pipes, girders and blast walls. Even the dais in the auditorium is armored.
But on a recent afternoon, the talk inside the building, set atop an arid, inland hillside in Orange County, is not about fighting wars but about caring for warriors. Doctors, scientists and veterans approach the podium at a conference to present some of the latest tools to help vets recover from wounds both mental and physical: bionics, virtual reality, magnetic waves.
A session called “Healing the Warrior Brain” features a trim, bleach-blond former Army staff sergeant named Jonathan Warren, who recounts on video his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq. His flashbacks, panic attacks and booze benders were well chronicled: For a year, the Los Angeles Times tracked Warren’s efforts to find peace, including via Department of Veterans Affairs therapy.
It didn’t work, he says. But now a different Jon Warren is here to say that he is finally free of symptoms, one year after that 2013 story ran. No longer does his worst memory of the Iraq war — failing to rescue his best friend, who nearly burned to death after their Humvee hit a roadside bomb in 2006 — grasp his psyche and inflict guilt.
That’s because of a revolutionary new treatment that retuned his brain, he says, and set “my frequencies right.” Now he’s able to proudly embrace his military service, “to keep the memory, to be able to go there,” Warren tells the audience, “and not be controlled by it.”